Maëlle's R blog

There are already three functions of note on a piece of paper on my desk, so it’s time to blog about them! This post was featured on the R Weekly podcast by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. How does this package depend on this other package? pak::pkg_deps_explain() The pak package by Gábor Csárdi makes installing packages easier. If I need to start working on a package, I clone it, then run pak::pak() to install and update its dependencies.

I (only! but luckily!) recently got introduced to the magic of purrr::reduce(). Thank you, Tobias! I was told about it right as I was unhappily using many for loops in a package1, for lack of a better idea. In this post I’ll explain how purrr::reduce() helped me reduce my for loop usage. I also hope that if I’m doing something wrong, someone will come forward and tell me! This post was featured on the R Weekly podcast by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas.

Following my recent post on three useful (to me) R patterns, I’ve written down three other things on a tiny sticky note. This post will allow me to throw away this beaten down sticky note, and maybe to show you one element you didn’t know? nzchar(): “a fast way to find out if elements of a character vector are non-empty strings” One of my favorite testing technique is the escape hatch strategy, about which I wrote a post on the R-hub blog: you make part of your code responsive to an environment variable, and you locally set that environment variable in your tests.

This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. I’m happy to report that I thought “oh but I know a better way to write that code!” a few times lately when reading old scripts of mine, or scripts by others. It’s a good feeling because it shows progress! I’ve tooted about all three things I’ll present in this post: After reading Julia Evans’ post about blogging, I decided to train the blogging muscle a bit using these low-hanging fruits/toots1.

If you’ve been taught git and GitHub but practice so rarely that you’re discouraged, what should you do to re-start more easily? Let’s imagine you have to, or really want to, use git and GitHub for your next analysis project. Here’s what I would recommend… I assume you already own a GitHub account. If not, refer to happygitwithr guidance. Thanks to the people who shared recommendations on Mastodon, whose names are acknowledged in the rest of the post!